Credit card delinquency and Covid-19: Neighborhood trends in the Seventh District

Dharmasankar, Sharada; George, Taz; Newberger, Robin G.; O'Dell, Mark

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Credit card delinquency and Covid-19: Neighborhood trends in the Seventh District

Abstract: The Covid-19 pandemic has resulted in great economic and financial disruption. To better understand how financial hardships have varied across communities, we investigate credit card delinquencies across the states of the Federal Reserve’s Seventh District: Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, and Wisconsin. While we find a slight increase of less than 1 percentage point in delinquency rates across the District overall following the onset of the pandemic, we find more pronounced increases of about 2 percentage points in low- and moderate-income (LMI) neighborhoods and about 3 percentage points in majority Black neighborhoods.

JEL Classification: D14; R23;